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It had received the dangerous sanction of the soul. She turned off the high road at the point where, three months ago, she had seen Mary cycling up the hill from Morfe. Now, as then, she descended upon Morfe by the stony lane from the moor below Karva. It came over her that she was too late, that she would see rows of yellow blinds drawn down in the long front of Rowcliffe's house.
With admirable tact she assumed Rowcliffe's interest in Ally and the Vicar. It made it easier to begin about Gwenda. And before she began it seemed to her that she had better first find out if he knew. So she asked him point-blank if he had heard from Gwenda? "No," he said. At her name he had winced visibly. But there was hope even in his hurt eyes.
Rowcliffe took Mary's hand in his and they ran down the path. "He can sprint fast enough now," said Rowcliffe's uncle. But his youngest cousin and Harker, his best friend, had gone faster. They were waiting together on the bridge, and the girl had a slipper in her hand. "Were you ever," she said, "at such an awful wedding?"
It knew why Alice Cartaret had gone wrong with Greatorex. It knew what Gwenda Cartaret had gone for when she went away. It knew why and how Dr. Rowcliffe had married Mary Cartaret. And it knew why, night after night, he was to be seen coming and going on the Garthdale road. The village knew more about Rowcliffe and Gwenda Cartaret than Rowcliffe's wife knew.
"I suppose," she said to herself, "she couldn't help it." The lights of Morfe shone through the November darkness. The little slow mare crawled up the winding hill to the top of the Green; Rowcliffe's horse was slower. But no sooner had Peacock's trap passed the doctor's house on its way out of the village square, than the clanking hoofs went fast. Rowcliffe was free to go his own pace now.
Rowcliffe had found that he could not understand what he had read. "Huh! What do you addle your brains with that stuff for?" he said. "It amuses me." "Oh so long as you're amused." He pushed away the book that had offended him. They talked about the Vicar, about Alice, about Rowcliffe's children, about the changes in the Dale, the coming of the Maceys and the going of young Grierson.
It was only at night, when Ally's brain slept among its dreams, that Rowcliffe's face leaned near to hers without ever touching it, and his arms made as if they clasped her and never met. Even then, always at the first intangible approach of him, she woke, terrified because dreams go by contraries. "Is your sister always so silent?" He was alone with Mary. "Who? Ally? No. She isn't silent at all.
I'm trying to tell you. Ally'll go on being ill as long as there are three of us knocking about the house. You'll find she'll buck up like anything when I'm gone. There's nothing the matter with her, really." "That may be your opinion. It isn't Rowcliffe's." "I know it isn't. But it soon will be. It was your own idea a little while ago." "Ye es; before this last attack, perhaps.
She had thought of that. She was fond of having Gwenda with her in Rowcliffe's absence, when she could talk to her about him in a way that assumed his complete indifference to Gwenda and utter devotion to herself. Gwenda was used to this habit of Mary's and thought nothing of it. She found her in Rowcliffe's study, the room that she knew better than any other in his house. The window was closed.
Gwenda did not know why her fierceness was appeased by this unlikeness, nor why she wanted to see Mary and nothing but Mary in Rowcliffe's children, nor why she refused to think of them as his; she only knew that to see Rowcliffe in Mary's children would have been more than her flesh and blood could bear. "You've come just in time to see Baby in her bath," said Mary.
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